Condition monitoring of roller bearings is of increasing importance, particularly in applications with roller bearings of intermediate and greater size, such as for example the roller bearings used in wind energy converters or in other types of power plants, in general.
One particular example of an operating condition to be monitored is the monitoring of the present load on the bearing, which has significant impact on the calculating of a remaining service live, the occurrence of over-load conditions or of under-load conditions etc. However, apart from directly gathering information on operating conditions of a roller bearing, condition monitoring may also be utilized to determine useful information on a major system embodying the particular roller bearing. For example, if roller bearings in the hubs or wheels of an automobile are employing load sensing, the individual load on the wheels may be determined such as to, for example, electronically control the amount of power provided to each driven wheel or the amount of braking power applied to each of the wheels.
Despite its undeniable benefits, condition monitoring of roller bearings is only rarely used, since different types of sensors, evaluation electronics and communication electronics utilized to communicate the determined load or another operating condition to a monitoring circuit have to be separately installed on the roller bearing, wired together and provided with operating energy. It may be rather time consuming and expensive to individually attach the different sensor types and the associated evaluation electronics and energy sources to the roller bearings. Furthermore, conventional solutions require excessive amounts of additional space in the environment of the roller bearing so that typically completely new constructions had to be performed, when condition monitoring had to be integrated into a roller bearing.
Hence, there is a desire for a concept allowing to implement condition monitoring in roller bearings more efficiently.